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Kensington Market Loblaws: Is Toronto becoming a city of ‘no’?

NIMBY uprisings against everything from a Loblaws to Frank Gehry’s fanciful towers raise questions for urbanists who wonder if we’re too resistant to change.

A proposed expansion of Billy Bishop Airport - which would mean building runways out into the harbour - is one of the city's hot topics right now. (COLIN MCCONNELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Residents of the Kensington Market area went into a fury over plans to include a Walmart in a redevelopment of part of Bathurst St. near the market, gaining the ear of city councillors. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP/Getty Images)

An early model of the lower parts of Frank Gehry's towers proposed for King St. E.

Loblaws plans to put a smaller, urban version of its grocery stores on the second level of a condo building near Kensington Market. (Aaron Vincent Elkaim / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

It’s enough to make some experts wonder if Toronto is becoming a city resistant to change.

“My sense is Toronto has become a city where it is much easier to say no or veto projects than to do new and important initiatives and projects,” said urbanist Richard Florida.

Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, said some ideas may not be good — like big-box stores near Kensington — but the Mirvish-Gehry towers and quiet jets at the island airport are worthy projects.

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“I worry a lot that Toronto is divided between the anti-urban, pro-car, pro sprawl agenda of Ford Nation and a naysaying NIMBY downtown crowd,” he said.

But Toronto must find a new way to grow downtown, based on density, transit and far less dependence on cars if it wants to be a global city, Florida said.

“This is a very, very hard transition for any city and region to make. And it is why so many cities and regions essentially get stuck when they get to roughly 5.5 or 6 million people, where we are now.”

Eric Miller, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto, said residents of most cities react negatively, at least at first, to change. People tend to overestimate the risks of change while underestimating the cost of maintaining the status quo, he said.

Miller said Toronto may be unique because of its history of preserving its distinct neighbourhoods. Residents choose to live in certain areas because of their character, so they see change as a challenge to their values, he said.

“There is a stream of thought that maybe the pendulum has swung too far here, that in fact we are too much emphasizing the neighbourhood and how sacrosanct it is, and it does become a barrier to needed change,” he said.

“Cities are dynamic things, and they are going to change. A static city becomes a museum piece or becomes obsolete and abandoned.”

Chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat disagreed that Toronto had become a city of saying “no.” She said development was booming and the population downtown had doubled in a five-year period.

“What you see is a reflection of a tremendous amount of change all happening at once. When an environment is changing rapidly, and there’s a lot of change, there always is a tension between existing uses and existing users and new uses and new users,” she said.

“It’s the role of city planning to negotiate those interests, and to ensure, that as a place changes, it becomes more livable, more desirable and has a higher quality of life.”

It’s not that the neighbourhood is resisting change, said Dominique Russell, a longtime resident and member of Friends of Kensington Market.

“I think it’s really important to make the distinction between the change that’s always been part of Kensington — new shops opening up, independent businesses coming and going — from this particular change, which is big corporations coming in and deciding what the community is going to be,” she said.

Adam Vaughan, councillor for the area, said Toronto had said yes to a lot of good ideas, but bad ideas tend to be the ones that get attention.

“When you’ve got a lot of stupid ideas running around your city, sometimes no is the answer — whether it’s the casino or the ridiculous proposal to build the Ottawa International Airport on a postage stamp,” he said, referring to the island airport expansion.

“When you don’t have good ideas driving the agenda, you end up having to say no.”

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